Impeachment, as the Democrats have taught us, is more than anything else a political act. But the presentation of their House impeachment managers yesterday, and their generally unhealthy obsession with our former president, makes clear that it is also an emotional act.

As to that obsession, conservative commentator Larry Elder observed on Fox News, “Donald Trump is being impeached [again] for the unpardonable offense, the capital felony, of being Donald Trump.”

The overall strategy of the Democrats appears to be to damage our nation’s 45th president as much as possible, and to tar all of his supporters by extension – but to do so while hanging him around the party’s neck like an albatross. Whether it’ll work is anyone’s guess, but that’s the primary reason for the Democrats emotive and legally dubious performance so far.

As the Washington Examiner’s W. James Antle reports, “Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the lead impeachment manager, fought back tears as he recalled his daughter being with him at the Capitol. On Wednesday, he traced the violence back to Trump’s speech to supporters protesting an election he told them was stolen. ‘He told them to fight like hell, and they brought hell that day,’ Raskin said. The congressman called Trump the ‘inciter in chief.’”

Strangely missing from Raskin’s richly choreographed presentation — and, for that matter, missing from every impeachment manager’s presentation — was an unambiguous and exculpatory utterance from President Donald Trump’s January 6 speech just prior to the premeditated riot: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Yeah, we know, the president did indeed tell his supporters that they need to “fight like hell” if they want to keep their country. But there are many forms of fighting, and many of them are non-physical. On the other hand, it’s literally impossible to misconstrue the word “peacefully.” There’s no such thing as a peaceful riot or, to use the Democrats’ favorite term, a peaceful “armed insurrection.”

If this was an armed insurrection, it was the least effective one in history. Where were the arms? The flagsticks, perhaps? Because the only firearm brandished or discharged that day was the one used by an as-yet unnamed Capitol Police lieutenant — a “hero” according to his lawyer — who shot an unarmed woman, Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year Air Force veteran, as she appeared to be climbing through a window into the Speaker’s Lobby.

Speaking of shameless hyperbole, the Left keeps telling us that “five people died in the riot,” but the whole truth about those five is a lot more complicated than they’d have us believe. We’ve yet to hear any of the managers mention that all five were supporters of Donald Trump, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died the following night after having collapsed. He was not, as the Leftmedia repeatedly and falsely reported, “bludgeoned to death” with a fire extinguisher. No one seems to know what killed Officer Sicknick, but there’s zero evidence that it was due to an injury that occurred during the riot.

“As for the civilian deaths being counted by the Left, commentator Matt Walsh writes, "Overall, based on the available evidence, we can say conclusively that one person, Ashli Babbitt, was directly killed by violence in the riot. We can say with relative certainly that two others died of medical emergencies stemming from underlying health concerns. That leaves two, Sicknick and [Rosanne] Boyland, whose deaths are still a relative mystery — to the public, anyway. Presumably the autopsy results could lend quite a bit of clarity, but those results are being withheld, for whatever reason. At this point, any claim that five people died because of the riot, or were killed by the riot, or even that five people died in the riot, is based more on speculation than evidence. It is what the social media company and the news media itself would normally call ‘misinformation.’”

Mercifully for the rest of us, the Democrats’ emotional appeal for impeachment and conviction will soon be over.